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Pondera FraudCast Blog

Pondera FraudCast

Welcome to the Pondera FraudCast, a weekly blog where we post information on fraud trends, lessons learned from client engagements, and observations from our investigators in the field. We hope you’ll check back often to stay current with our efforts to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in large government programs.

While I don’t often review books on this blog, I feel compelled to share my thoughts on American Kingpin by Nick Bilton, which chronicles the history of the Silk Road. For those who don’t know, the Silk Road was a market on the dark web that sold drugs, weapons, poisons, and even human body parts. By the time it was shut down in 2013, the site was selling over $1 billion per year.

The book offers fascinating insights into the dark web, the libertarian creator of the site, the investigators who worked to shut it down, and the political schisms that often make it possible to run sites like the Silk Road. And of course, the book has great relevance to the fraud detection business because fraudsters often acquire identities on the dark web to create fictitious businesses, file for tax refunds, and make fake unemployment insurance claims.

While American Kingpin ended with the shutdown of the Silk Road and the prosecutions of the major actors behind the market, it is important to note that similar sites continue to operate on the dark web. In fact, just days after I finished reading the book, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the FBI had shut down a similar site 10 times the size of the Silk Road. At the time this site was shut down last month, it contained 369,000 listings for drugs, weapons, malware, chemicals, counterfeit items, and more.

This is a sobering reminder of the challenges facing law enforcement when dealing with anonymous browsers like TOR, the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and international crime rings. The dark web is not going away. Neither is the demand for illicit items. It will be interesting to see how this “cat and mouse” games plays out over the coming years.